Thursday, March 31, 2016

In the wake of the tragic Brussels bombing last week, just a few months after a similar attack in Paris and our own American shooting spree in San Bernardino, one would think the attacked countries, including the United States, would be seriously rethinking their refugee immigration policies. But no. President Obama, despite increasing Islamic terrorism, is doubling down, with no plan to back off his promise to admit 100,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees to the U.S. this year. In his Easter weekend radio address, "Obama underscored that the United States has to engage Muslims as partners in the fight against terrorism." How is that working out so far, Mr. President? Undoubtedly, the president is referring to the so-called moderate Muslims, elusive as leprechauns and unicorns, those willing to raise their voices and take a strong stand against their more radical brethren. Where are they? When is the "Million Muslim March" scheduled for the Washington, D.C......Don't be fooled by the term "refugee." While many are fleeing the chaos of the Middle East and Northern Africa, others have an agenda and could reasonably be considered invaders instead. ISIS claims to have smuggled thousands of extremists into Europe. How many have been granted entrance into the U.S.? We may never know until it's too late...

YSL French fashion mogul Pierre Bergé blasts designers’ Islamic clothing lines: “Creators should have nothing to do with Islamic fashion” - The fashion industry was created and subsists for one reason and one reason only: to exalt, enhance and celebrate the beauty of women. Islamic garb for women was created to hide, shame and obliterate the beauty of women. Pierre Bergé, the brilliant co-founder of Yves Saint Laurent Couture House and onetime life partner of the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, has taken the fashion world to task for fashion’s leading couture houses who create cloth coffins and other Islamic clothing. Finally – a voice of reason in a world of slobbering slaves. The vicious fashion trend is misogyny on steroids.....

Laptop recovered in Brussels raid had images of Belgian Prime Minister’s office - Big plans — they have big plans. These same elites that enabled this invasion and destruction of Europe will meet their end at the hands of the very people they imported into their countries....An official linked to the investigation of the Brussels attacks says that a laptop found near the hideout of the suspects of the March 22 airport bombing contained images of the prime minister’s official residence and office. The official, who asked not to be identified because the investigation is ongoing, said that at the moment there were “absolutely no” specific indications that Prime...

My Take - At some point this is going to become so extreme the very people governing Europe will become the targets. What then? Will these multicultural leftists recant and realize they've negotiated an suicide pact between Europe and Islam? No, I think they're just as insane as Obama the leftists here in America. At some point the people of Europe will have all they can stand and there will be a civil war, or a revolution if you will, and violence will erupt on a scale not seen since WWII. Then what? The multicultural leftists will be replaced with tyrannical nationalist leftists. The economy will have collapsed, and may be unfixable, the conditions will be dystopic and Muslims will be expelled with the resulting violence. Europe is doomed forever as a major economic or military power. They're breeding themselves out of existence. This will the final death stroke of the EU and most of western Europe. Eastern Europe may end up saving Europe as a whole since they understand the insanity of leftists ideology, having suffered under communism for so many decades. Perhaps another John III Sobieski will arise to lead them. If France wants to survive they have better find another Hammer of France like Charles Martel. However by then - Europe will be bankrupt and might not be able to recover - ever - and forever being economically exiled into the third world.

Guess who these arrogant condescending European elitists will then turn to for a bail out? But that door is closing fast, and by then - by 2020 America's economy will be facing a massive depression that will make the Great Depression seem mild. And there will be no baby boomer capital generators among the working generations. America will be in the midst of a ten year economic mess we won't be able to climb out of until 2030. The world has gone insane! And can anyone tell me whether Hollande has lost his mind or is he really just stupid!France: Hollande drops plans to strip nationality from those convicted of terror attacks - He shouldn’t drop these plans. He should find a way to do it. This is a war. The French citizens who are waging jihad against France only value their French nationality insofar as it enables them to kill French non-Muslims. These jihad killers aren’t “Frenchmen,” no matter what the mainstream media says. They’re members of the global umma, and the global jihad force, and that’s the only identity that matters to them,

My Take - Well.... I agree, that's exactly what they're doing, and I hope they continue because the supremacy of western values based on Judaic/Christian principles, compared to the rest of the world - especially the Islamic world - is staggeringly overwhelming. And the young need to become aware of that.

Associated Press willingly COLLUDED with the Nazis, new report shows @AP - The more things change, the more they stay the same. During World War II, the AP covered for the Nazis; today they softsell and scrub the jihad. The AP colluded with the 20th century Nazis to advance their cause. And today the AP is colluding with 21st century Nazis to advance their Islamic cause. Too bad this news wasn’t released to a far more moral world after the war — the AP would have been drummed out of business. Instead, they are laying the groundwork for the Holocaust redux......

Obama: “Republican Base had been Fed this Notion that Islam is Inherently Violent” - The Republican base or jihadis? The Republican base or ISIS? The Republican base or Hamas or Muslim Brotherhood or al Qaeda or Boko Haram or al Shabaab …. must I go on? The Republican base or the Quran? Saying the Republican Base had been fed this notion that Islam is inherently violent is like saying women have been fed this notion that rape is inherently violent. Like Aristotle said, A is A. It is what it is. There is no lie too big for our sharia chieftain.....

My Take - Another example of cognitive dissonance and Orwell's "newspeak" from the left - and in this case from a unaccomplished delusional egomaniac who has done more to destroy world peace and the security of the west than anyone since Adolf Hitler.

Obama Admin Feds Give $270K Grant To Islamic ‘Charity’ With Alleged Ties To Jihad Terror Groups - This is consistent with Obama’s years-long pro-jihad policy both here and abroad. This is a pattern. Despite a “mountain of evidence,” Obama’s DoJ scuttled the prosecutions of scores of terror-tied Islamic groups named in the largest terrorist funding trial in our nation’s history — including CAIR, ISNA, MSA et al. The idea that Obama and his party are funding our executioners with our own hard-earned taxpayer dollars is just further proof of the treason and anti-Americanism endemic to the left....

My Take - Solution? Expel all Muslims and declare Islam is a political criminal movement masquerading as a religion, and the fact they've managed to that successfully for 1400 years is immaterial. Then tell the leftists around the world who object to go and pound salt. See - clarity!PIPE BOMB discovered near Disneyland California on EASTER Sunday - Easter Sunday? Hmmmm, who could it be now? Pipe bomb exploded in an alley nearby to Disneyland Park in California. The bomb detonated with such force that it left a hole in the fence behind. Nearby residents had to be evacuated from their homes while police investigated Officer: ‘It’s serious – especially on Easter Sunday with people gathering’......

My Take - "It’s serious – especially on Easter Sunday with people gathering" Well Duh! And this is waking these people up to what????? After all - this can't be Islamic terrorism because Obama doesn't believe in that. Right?

I have read about the paradoxical alliance between Islam and the left for years. I have even written about it -- at some length, in fact, in my newest book Scarlet Letters. But it was only a few weeks go that I got to see up close the mechanisms that allow people who celebrate homosexuals to find common cause with those who, when the law allows, happily sever their heads. As a result of my book, I was invited to sit on a panel titled “Muslim in the Metro,” an event sponsored by an enterprise called American Public Square and televised in edited form -- fairly, I must say -- on the regional PBS channel here in Kansas City, KCPT.

There were five panelists -- myself, a Republican state rep from Kansas, a fiftyish Muslim woman in the diversity business, a U.S. attorney appointed by Obama, and a female Muslim college student who used the word “microagression” as something other than a punch line to a joke. The moderator was also a former Obama appointee....... The left has a unique ability to deny the obvious......The left instinctively denies the worth of America.....The left controls the debate.......The left inevitably falls back on false moral equivalence......The left is plagued with cognitive dissonance.......The alliance validates the left’s moral superiority......Did I mention that the left denies the obvious?
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Now there’s another example of a tax that is very tempting, and it comes from my home state of Connecticut.

When I was growing up, the Nutmeg State didn’t have an income tax and it was a refuge for overtaxed New Yorkers. But then an income tax was imposed in 1991. And ever since politicians got their hands on this new source of revenue, the burden of spending has skyrocketed and Connecticut has become a fiscal dystopia.

So you would think I’d be reflexively hostile to additional tax hikes by the politicians in Hartford. And I should be, but I’m perversely intrigued by a new levy they’re considering. The Wall Street Journalopines on the proposal.

…most Yale University professors are proud to be progressives. Well, they are now getting the chance to live their convictions as Connecticut Democrats attempt to soak Yale’s rich endowment. Democrats in Hartford have proposed taxing the unspent earnings of university endowments with more than $10 billion in assets. Only Yale’s $25.6 billion endowment—the country’s second largest after Harvard—fits the tax bill. Yale’s tax-exempt investments earned $2.6 billion last year, eight times more than the University of Connecticut’s $384 million endowment. Oh, the inequality! …Hartford is already taxing anything that moves. Last year Democrats raised the top individual tax rate to 6.99% and extended a 20% corporate surtax. The tax hikes precipitated General Electric’s decision in January to move its headquarters to Boston. Between 2010 and 2015, Connecticut lost 105,000 residents to other states. For the last five years, it has recorded zero real GDP growth.

Nobody should be double taxed on income that is saved and invested, so my mind tells me that the right approach is to give all taxpayers the treatment now reserved for places like Yale.
But my heart tells me the opposite because it’s galling that Yale is dominated by statists who presumably want higher taxes on the rest of us, so maybe it’s time they swallow some of their own bitter medicine.

But the way, it’s not just state politicians that are salivating to pillage Yale. It’s now being reported that city politicians want a slice of the action.

The mayor of New Haven is backing a push to revisit an 1834 Connecticut statute affecting taxes for Yale University, saying new guidelines are needed to assess liability for the institution… “Since taxing real estate and other property is the only form of municipal taxation allowed by state law, more modern guidelines as to what’s taxable and what’s tax exempt are essential,” New Haven Mayor Toni Harp said this week in testimony supporting the legislation. …The Ivy League university has strongly objected to proposal.

Gee, I wonder if Yale also “strongly objected” to the various big tax hikes that have savaged the state’s investors, entrepreneurs, and small businesses? Or is their battlefield conversion against tax hikes solely a selfish gesture.

Needless to say, I’m sure it’s the latter, which is why part of me is thinking it would be rough justice if the jackals in state and local government descended on Yale.
That being said, I certainly don’t like the idea of these profligate politicians getting their greedy hands on even more money. So if they do impose taxes on Yale, I hope the university will consider a very thoughtful invitation from the Governor of Florida.

Gov. Rick Scott…issued a statement calling on the Ivy League institution to pick up stakes and move on down to sunny Florida. “We would welcome a world-renowned university like Yale to our state and I can commit that we will not raise taxes on their endowment,” Governor Scott said

And since Florida doesn’t double tax anybody, Yale’s leftist professors could sleep easier at night since they no longer would be hypocrites who work at a school that enjoys tax-free status on its investments while neighbors are being taxed.

If you’re keeping score, freeing Islamic terrorists from Gitmo does not play into the hands of ISIS. Neither does bringing Syrians, many of whom sympathize with Islamic terrorists, into our country. And aiding the Muslim Brotherhood parent organization of ISIS does not play into the Islamic group’s hands.

However if you use the words “Islamic terrorism” or even milder derivatives such as “radical Islamic terrorism”, you are playing into the hands of ISIS. If you call for closer law enforcement scrutiny of Muslim areas before they turn into Molenbeek style no-go zones or suggest ending the stream of new immigrant recruits to ISIS in San Bernardino, Paris or Brussels, you are also playing into the hands of ISIS.

And if you carpet bomb ISIS, destroy its headquarters and training camps, you’re just playing into its hands. According to Obama and his experts, who have wrecked the Middle East, what ISIS fears most is that we’ll ignore it and let it go about its business. And what it wants most is for us to utterly destroy it. Or as Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau said, "If you kill your enemies, they win."

But maybe if you surrender to them, then you win.

Tens of thousands of Muslim refugees make us safer. But using the words “Muslim terrorism” endangers us. The more Muslims we bring to America, the faster we’ll beat ISIS. As long as we don’t call it the Islamic State or ISIS or ISIL, but follow Secretary of State John Kerry’s lead in calling it Daesh.

Because terrorism has no religion. Even when it’s shouting, “Allahu Akbar”.

Obama initially tried to defeat ISIS by ignoring it. This cunning approach allowed ISIS to seize large chunks of Iraq and Syria. He tried calling ISIS a J.V. team in line with his claim that, “We defeat them in part by saying you are not strong, you are weak”. Unimpressed, ISIS seized Mosul. It was still attached to the old-fashioned way of proving it was strong by actually winning land and wars.

Europe and the United States decided to prove that we were not at war with Islam by taking in as many Muslims as we could. Instead of leading to less terrorism, taking in more Muslims led to more terrorism.

Every single counterintuitive strategy for defeating Islamic terrorism has been tried. And it has failed. Overthrowing “dictators” turned entire countries into terrorist training camps. Bringing Islamists to power in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia led directly to attacks on American diplomatic facilities. The Muslim Brotherhood showed no gratitude to its State Department allies. Instead its militias and forces either aided the attackers or stood by and watched while taking bets on the outcome.

Islamic terrorism has followed an intuitive pattern of cause and effect. There’s a reason that the counterintuitive strategies for fighting Islamic terrorism by not fighting Islamic terrorism don’t work. They make no sense. Instead they all depend on convincing Muslims, from the local Imam to Jihadist organizations, to aid us instead of attack us by showing what nice people we are. Meanwhile they also insist that we can’t use the words “Islamic terrorism” because Muslims are ticking time bombs who will join Al Qaeda and ISIS the moment we associate terrorism with the I-word.

There are contradictions there that you can drive a tank through.

The counterintuitive strategy assumes that Islamic terrorism will only exist if we use the I-word, that totalitarian Jihadist movements want democracy and that our best allies for fighting Islamic terrorism are people from the same places where Islamic terrorism is a runaway success. And that we should duplicate the demographics of the countries where Islamic terrorism thrives in order to defeat it.

The West’s counterterrorism strategy makes less sense than the ravings of most mental patients. The only thing more insane than the counterintuitive strategy for defeating Islamic terrorism is the insistence that the intuitive strategy of keeping terrorists out and killing them is what terrorists want.

If you believe the experts, then Islamic terrorists want us to stop them from entering Europe, America, Canada and Australia. They crave having their terrorists profiled by law enforcement on the way to their latest attack. And they wish we would just carpet bomb them as hard as we can right now.

When ISIS shoots up Paris or Brussels, it’s not really trying to kill infidels for Allah. Instead it’s setting a cunning trap for us. If we react by ending the flow of migrants and preventing the next attack, ISIS wins. If we police Muslim no-go zones, then ISIS also wins. If we deport potential terrorists, ISIS still wins.

But if we let ISIS carry out another successful attack, then ISIS loses. And we win. What do we win?

It depends. A concert hall full of corpses. Marathon runners with severed limbs. Families fleeing the airport through a haze of smoke. Only by letting ISIS kill us, do we have any hope of beating ISIS.

Politicians and experts claim that ISIS is insane. It’s not insane. It’s evil. Its goals are clear and comprehensible. The objectives of the Islamic State are easy to intuitively grasp. Our leaders and experts are the ones who are out of their minds. They may or may not be evil, but they are utterly insane. And they have projected their madness on Islamic terrorists who are downright rational compared to them.

Unlike our leaders, Islamic terrorists don’t confuse victory and defeat. They aren’t afraid that they’ll win. They don’t want us to kill them or deport them. They don’t care whether we call them ISIS or Daesh. They don’t derive their Islamic legitimacy from John Kerry or a State Department Twitter account. They get it from the Koran and the entire rotting corpus of Islamic law that they seek to impose on the world.

Our leaders are the ones who are afraid of winning. They distrust the morality of armed force and borders. They disguise that distrust behind convoluted arguments and counterintuitive rationales. Entire intellectual systems are constructed to explain why defeating ISIS is exactly what ISIS wants.

After the San Bernardino shootings, Obama insisted that, “Our success won’t depend on tough talk or abandoning our values... That’s what groups like ISIL are hoping for.” But ISIS does not care whether Obama talks tough, even if it’s only his version of tough talk in which he puffs out his chest and says things like, ”You are not strong, you are weak.” It is not interested in Obama’s “right side of history” distortion of American values either.

ISIS is not trying to be counterintuitive. It’s fighting to win. And our leaders are fighting as hard as they can to lose.

The counterintuitive strategy is not meant to fight terror, but to convince the populace that winning is actually losing and losing is actually winning. The worse we lose, the better our plan is working. And when we have completely lost everything then we’ll have the terrorists right where we want them.

Just ask the dead of Brussels, Paris, New York and a hundred other places.

This isn’t a plan to win. It’s a plan to confuse the issue while losing. It’s a plan to convince everyone that what looks like appeasement, defeatism, surrender and collaboration with the enemy is really a brilliant counterintuitive plan that is the only possible path to a lasting victory over Islamic terrorism.

But intuitive beats counterintuitive. Winning intuitively beats losing counterintuitively. Counterintuitively dead terrorists multiply, but intuitively they stay dead. Counterintuitively, not discussing the problem is the best way to solve it. Intuitively, you solve a problem by facing it. Counterintuitively, collaborating with the enemy is patriotism. Intuitively, it’s treason.

Folks on the left may get excited by whether we travel 60 mph in the wrong direction or 90 mph in the wrong direction, but this seems like a Hobson’s choice for those of us who would prefer that America become more like Hong Kong or Singapore.

Consider the issue of taxation. Clinton and Sanders both agree that they want to raise tax rates on investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and other “rich” taxpayers. The only difference is how high and how quickly.

He starts by speculating whether there’s a rate high enough to satisfy the greed of these two politicians.

Here is a question to ask Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders: What is the best tax rate to impose on high-income earners…? Perhaps they think it is 83%, a rate that economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez hypothesized in 2014… Or maybe it is 90%, which Sen. Sanders told CNBC last May was not out of the question.

He then points out that there were very high tax rates in America between World War II and the Reagan era.

…the U.S. had such rates in the past. From 1936 to 1980, the highest federal income-tax rate was never below 70%, and the top rate exceeded 90% from 1951 to 1963. …The discussion of these rates can easily create the impression that the federal government collected far more money from “the rich” before the Reagan administration.

But rich people aren’t fatted calves awaiting slaughter. They generally are smart enough to figure out ways to avoid high tax rates. And if they’re not smart enough, they know to hire bright lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants who figure out ways to protect their income.

Which is exactly what happened.

The effective tax rates actually paid by the highest income earners during the 1950s and early ’60s were far lower than the highest marginal rates. …In the 1960s, for example, the average rate paid by the top 0.1% of tax filers—the top 10th of the top 1%—ranged from 26.5% to 29.5%, according to a 2007 study by Messrs. Piketty and Saez. Even during the 20 years after the Reagan tax cuts, the top 10th of the top 1% paid an average rate of 23.7% to 33%—essentially the same as in the 1960s.

Gee, sounds like Hauser’s Law – a limit on how much governments can tax – is true, at least for upper-income taxpayers.

And Winship provides some data showing that high tax rate are not the way to collect more revenue.

When average tax rates went up from 27.6% in 1965 to 34% in 1975, revenues went down, from 0.6% to 0.5% of the sum of GDP plus capital gains. When average tax rates declined to 23.7% over the second half of the 1970s and the ’80s, tax revenues from the top went up, reaching 0.8% of GDP plus capital gains in 1990. …in the early 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton raised average tax rates at the top, and revenue from the top 0.1% eventually skyrocketed. But the flood of revenue overwhelmingly reflected not the increase in rates but the stock market’s takeoff… Consider: If the higher top tax rates had caused the growth in revenue, then revenues should have fallen when Mr. Clinton cut the top tax rate on capital gains to 20% from 28% in 1997. But revenues from the top 0.1% kept pouring in.

And if you want more detail, check out the IRS data from the 1980s, which shows that rich taxpayers paid a lot more tax when the top rate was dropped from 70 percent to 28 percent.

Mr. Piketty said, “I firmly believe, that imposing a 70% or 80% marginal rate on large segments of the population (say, 25% of the population, or even 10%, or even a few percentage points) would lead to an economic disaster.” In other words, sayonara increased tax revenue.

Heck, even the European governments with the biggest welfare states rarely impose tax rates at those levels.

In other words, the rich already pay the lion’s share of tax in the United States. But not because we have 1970s-style tax rates, but because the tax burden is relatively modest for lower- and middle-income people.

Which brings us to Winship’s final point.

Proposals to soak the rich by raising their tax rates are unlikely to yield the revenue windfall that Mr. Sanders or Mrs. Clinton are dangling before voters. Leveling with the American people means…admitting that they will have to raise the money from tax hikes on middle-class voters.

Though he “buried the lede,” as they say in the journalism business. The most important takeaway from his column is that the redistribution agenda being advanced by Clinton and Sanders necessarily will require big tax hikes on the middle class.

The latest story on “green energy” here at the German online FOCUS magazine actually shocked me. Europe’s energy policy is, under the bottom line, costing the lives of tens of thousands of citizens – all at the holy altar of “climate protection”. FOCUS reports: In 2014 in Europe there were about 40,000 winter deaths because millions of people were unable to pay for their electric bills – the so-called energy poverty currently impacts about ten percent of all Europeans. In the past 8 years the price of electricity in Europe has climbed by an average of 42 percent. The consequences of energy poverty are profound: tens of thousands of deaths every year, millions losing their power. --Pierre Gosselin, No Tricks Zone, 29 March 2016

The fact that Germany is a world leader in green power is by now familiar. Much less familiar is the price the country is paying for it, not just in cold hard cash, but in growing losses and dislocations across the entire economy. The losers include once-stalwart utility giants like E.ON and RWE that are struggling with rising debt and falling shares. Manufacturing companies, from chemicals maker BASF to carbon fiber producer SGL Carbon, have shifted investments abroad, where energy costs are often a fraction of Germany’s. Losers include laid-off workers in these industries, but also millions of ordinary consumers. Their utility bills have skyrocketed, largely driven by subsidies for eco-friendly fuels. Germany’s “green” revolution has a dark shadow. --Gilbert Kreijger, Stefan Theil and Allison Williams, Handelsblatt, 24 March 2016

European global warming policies are hurting the continent’s poor, according to a Manhattan Institute study published Thursday. Europe has tried to fight global warming with cap-and-trade schemes and lucrative financial support to green power since 2005. Though well-meaning, the continent’s environmental efforts have only made life harder for Europe’s poor. Between 2005 and 2014, residential electricity rates on the continent increased by 63 percent according to the study. European-style global warming policies hurt the poor 1.4 to 4 times more than they hurt the rich, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. --Andrew Follett, The Daily Caller, 25 March 2016

Since 2005, members of the European Union have aggressively pushed policies aimed at addressing climate change. Those policies are primarily designed to decrease carbon-dioxide emissions and increase the use of renewable energy. At the same time, several European countries are restricting the production of natural gas and, in the case of Germany, aiming to phase out nuclear energy. These policies have resulted in dramatic increases in electricity costs for residential and industrial consumers. Although the E.U. has seen a reduction in its carbon-dioxide emissions since 2005, those reductions pale in comparison with increases in the developing world. The observable results from Europe thus offer a cautionary tale to policymakers in the United States who seek to tackle climate change via government mandate. --Robert Bryce, Manhattan Institute, 24 March 2016

Steel giant Tata is holding a board meeting in India which could decide the fate of thousands of UK workers. In January, Tata said it planned to cut more than a thousand jobs at its UK plants - with 750 due to be lost at Port Talbot in south Wales. Unless the board meeting in Mumbai agrees to this turnaround plan, the future of the plant could be in doubt. The UK steel industry has been hit by a combination of factors that have hit its competitiveness. These factors include relatively high energy prices, the extra cost of climate change policies, and competition from China. --BBC News, 29 March 2016

The Entomological Society of America (ESA) and Sociedade Entomológica do Brasil (SEB) held a Summit in Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil on 13 March, 2016 to discuss the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is the primary transmitter of Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever.

While the Summit featured talks on many aspects of mosquito biology, behavior, and control, the experts agreed that the most critical needs for controlling the mosquito and the diseases are:

1) Connecting scientists to communities more effectively through public awareness campaigns on how people can protect themselves from mosquitoes, and educational efforts to dispel misinformation regarding insect control measures.

2) Establishing mosquito control programs as a critical element of the campaign against Aedes aegypti, in addition to the important work already being done by the medical community on disease management. Prioritizing mosquito control would include funding for integrating well-established and novel control technologies as well as improving the collection and dissemination of data on mosquito populations and the efficacy of control measures.

3) Creating a coalition of international mosquito-control-related organizations to advocate for vector control as a critical element against Aedes aegypti and the diseases it transmits. Aedes aegypti is a container-breeding mosquito that is mostly problematic in municipalities, including urban centers.....To Read More....

Price Controls May Be On the Way, by Paul-Martin Foss
Central banks are in the business of price controls through monetary policy. But, when monetary policy fails, as it is doing now, central banks may look toward more broad forms of price controls as well......

If there is one thing that is bipartisan in Washington, it is brazen hypocrisy. Currently there is much indignation being expressed by Democrats because the Republican-controlled Senate refuses to hold confirmation hearings on President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.....When judges act like whores, they can hardly expect to be treated like nuns. Politicians, journalists and judges should all spare us pious hypocrisy.....

With her eyes bulging wildly, grotesque contorted facial expressions, and a cackle Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz”) would envy, Hillary Clinton attacked Donald Trump, saying that being president “shouldn’t be about delivering insults but about delivering results.” Delivering results juxtaposed to delivering insults is something in which Hillary is well versed. For example, rather than deliver insults as a strategic plan to keep her husband and then-president from being found guilty during his impeachment proceedings, she delivered results.

Allegedly, it was Hillary who was responsible for the “it depends upon what the meaning of ‘is’ is” defense. Hillary is rumored to have instructed the president to question the precise use of the word “is.” The president said: “it depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the – if he – if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not – that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” Now that is what can only be termed “delivering results.” Hillary has made a career of “delivering results” that keep her and her husband on the freedom side of prison bars.....To Read More

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Thirty years ago this March, Dayton Right to Life discovered a pre-born female child in the trash of a Dayton-area abortion facility.

Baby Fran was 14 to 16 weeks old at the time of abortion. Her finely detailed eyes, nose, mouth, chin, and spinal column stood as clear testimony to her humanity and the humanity of every unborn child whose life ends in abortion.

Not long after this horrifying discovery, Dayton Right to Life and other area pro-life organizations held a memorial service for Baby Fran at Woodland Cemetery. Four-hundred people attended.

Today at noon, Dayton Right to Life Society will commemorate the 30th Anniversary of this discovery with a prayer service at Baby Fran's grave site in Woodland Cemetery. As Dayton Right to Life says, "This is an opportunity for our community to come together and show respect for Baby Fran and the thousands of other young victims of abortion violence."

Since last summer's horrifying discovery that Planned Parenthood is trading aborted babies' body parts, the abortion industry has come under intense scrutiny and investigation. Here in Ohio, Attorney General Mike DeWine revealed that Planned Parenthood's abortion victims are being carted to landfills.

As the Dayton pro-life community commemorates the death of Baby Fran, we stand in solidarity with our friends at Dayton Right to Life, grieving post-abortive mothers, and the unborn victims of abortion.

In Columbus, the Ohio Right to Life team is hard at work on initiatives that will prohibit abortion violence and protect the dignity of its victims. Now that we have successfully de-funded Planned Parenthood of 1.3 million taxpayer dollars, we are continuing on the path to pass Ohio's Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and the Unborn Child Dignity Act.
If you are in the area, please join Dayton Right to Life at Woodland Cemetery, section 204 today at noon.

If you are unable to attend, please say a prayer for the victims of abortion, and consider sending a letter of support for our pro-life laws to your State Senator or Representative.

Hillary Clinton’s “trustworthiness” problem is fed by a long history of “varying credibility,” as a recent Politico story delineated, including cattle-futures trading, law firm billing records, muddled sniper fire recollections and e-mail use.

While providing pertinent points, the Politico list is just a sampling.

One missing item on the “mistrust” litany is a project she reportedly cooked up as Secretary of State, but that was shaped by her family foundation. State Department staff sent official emails to solicit funds from foreign governments.

The project sounds innocent enough: “to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and combat climate change.” What miracle product can do all that? A cookstove. Yes, that is correct—a cookstove. This is not the product of “as seen on TV” wizardry, nor is it the latest in high-efficiency appliances.

There’s something fishy when governments throughout the world (including the U.S), corporations (including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Johnson & Johnson), and Ted Turner’s UN Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative are involved as they are with the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (Alliance).

No one would begrudge corporations giving to a philanthropic effort, but we would probably feel differently about our own tax dollars going to the project Clinton is hawking—especially when the project is, by most accounts, an epic fail.

The Alliance claims to provide a solution to the “fourth worst overall health risk factor in developing countries.” Its website’s “Frequently Asked Questions” download states: “Exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires—the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly three billion people in the developing world—causes 1.9 million premature deaths annually with women and young children most affected.” Not only that, but “Reliance on biomass for cooking and heating increases pressure on local resources” as women and children “forage for fuel.” Additionally, “inefficient cookstoves contribute to climate change through emissions of greenhouse gases.”

To remedy this problem, it would make sense for the well-funded public-private partnership to use its money and influence to help build natural-gas-fueled power plants and infrastructure to bring electricity to the developing world. But that was not Clinton’s idea.

On September 21, 2010, the world first became aware of Clinton’s brainchild—though she may have stolen the idea from India’s National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative that made headlines around the world in the summer of 2010. The Secretary of State announced the Alliance at the Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (GCI)—with the Clinton Foundation being one of the “Strategic Partnerships and Alliances.” By November 2014, at the “Inaugural Cookstoves Futures Summit” it was announced that more than $400 million had been raised for the project. As co-host of the meeting, Clinton exclaimed: “We have to redouble our efforts to get more clean and efficient products in the hands and homes of families everywhere. ... We can rededicate ourselves to doing everything we can to help more people in more places to breathe more easily, work more safely and live healthier lives.” In her memoir, Hard Choices, she brags about her role in the Alliance: “I was delighted by the scope and speed of the progress [the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves] made around the world.”

“Progress” in the Alliance can be attributed to her influence as Secretary of State. Before the announcement of the Alliance, Kris Balderston, who served as her special representative for global partnerships, on his state.gov account pressured Norway to join. They obliged with a commitment for a $600,000 “down payment.” Apparently, as emails revealed, the country wanted to be part of the launch: “They wanted to move quickly for the CGI announcement.” (Note: Norway is a major donor to the Clinton Foundation.) Once Norway signed on, France and Finland were expected to follow suit. While traveling the globe, on the taxpayers’ dime, Clinton recruited more partners.

All big charity programs have celebrity spokespersons—the Alliance has actress Julia Roberts and chef Jose Andres—but Clinton was much more. She is credited with the program’s birth. While Secretary of State, it was “on the top of her agenda.” Once retiring from her official duties, Clinton became the Chair of the Alliance’s Leadership Council—where she still serves.

If you don’t know the rules, this may seem like petty politics. However, as Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on ethics in government, in the Washington Timescites the Code of Federal Regulations on the use of public office for private gain: “an employee shall not use his public office for his own private gain, for the endorsement of any product, service or enterprise, or for the private gain of friends, relatives or persons with whom the employee is affiliated in a nongovernmental capacity, including nonprofit organizations of which the employee is an officer or member.”

While at best, Clinton’s clean cookstove campaign seems slimy, and may be illegal, one might cast a blind eye if the program achieved its aggrandizing goals.

These so-called “clean cookstoves,” even by the Alliance’s own literature, “may last for several years”—yet only 20 percent, according to a survey cited in the Washington Post (WP), are still in use after two years. While the Alliance has reportedly “helped drive more that 28 million stoves into the field,” most do not meet the World Health Organization’s guidelines for indoor emissions. The WP states: “The vast majority of the stoves burn wood, charcoal, animal dung or agricultural waste—and aren’t, therefore, nearly as healthy as promised.” While “some perform well in the lab,” others “crack or break under constant heat.”

In her book, A River Runs Again, journalist Meera Subramanian chronicled cookstove use in India. The WP reports: “She found that women had stopped using the stoves because they didn’t like the design or because the stoves broke, burned more wood (not less, as intended) or didn’t get foods hot enough.”

Defending the Alliance’s effort, Radha Muthiah, CEO of the Alliance, says: “There may not be the greatest health benefit, but there’s certainly a good environmental benefit, and it will save them more time” and create “livelihood and empowerment opportunities.”

Distributing stoves that “we know will kill people” has been called “unethical.” Rema Hanna, the Harvard economist who led “Up in Smoke”—which WP calls “the most extensive field study to date on this subject”—says: “it makes no sense to ‘push more stoves into the world that people are not going to use.’” Citing a recent publication in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, David Kreutzer, Senior Research Fellow, Energy Economics and Climate Change at The Heritage Foundation, reports: “there were no long-term (after four years) health benefits from clean cook stoves. After two years, smoke inhalation was not at all different, and by the fourth year, nearly one-third of the households had so little use for the new stoves that they actually destroyed them.”

Rather than burning biomass, experts believe that gas, electricity, or both would be better at protecting health. Kreutzer agrees: “These cookstoves seem to be substitutes for efforts to provide affordable modern power to those in need”—which he says condemn so many of the poor to continuing energy poverty. Sadly, Alliance members oppose projects that would provide low-cost power to these poor households.

You have to wonder, if these cookstoves—which are more like a hibachi grill than a stove and cost about $25—don’t achieve the stated goals, why is Clinton such a proponent? As Christine Lakatos, whom I have worked with on dozens of green-energy, crony-corruption reports, and who alerted me to this dirty story, found in her Green Corruption File report, Alliance work was a high priority during Clinton’s time as Secretary of State. The project spanned eleven federal agencies and, so far, totals more than $114 million.

Her involvement complicates her “trustworthiness” concerns and risks, as the Washington Timespoints out: “Raising questions about where she drew the line between official business and aiding the family charity run by her husband and daughter.”

The answer to Clinton’s involvement, and the conflict of interest with her role at the State Department and “aiding the family charity,” deserves further investigation by someone with better access, and a bigger budget, than Lakatos or I have. But a hint can be found on the Alliances’ own website: carbon credits. It states: “In addition to being one of the fastest growing offset types in the voluntary market, cookstoves credits are selling for some of the highest prices observed in the voluntary carbon market.”

If Clinton becomes president, her energy policies will likely enact a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax—which would suddenly make her cookstove project profitable. Rather than helping bring modern power to the world’s poor, she’s, as Kreutzer calls it, “prolonging energy poverty for millions upon millions in the developing world.” And that is the dirty story behind Clinton’s clean cookstove campaign.

I’m never surprised when politicians make absurd statements, but I’m still capable of being shocked when other people make outlandish assertions.

Like the leftist policy wonk who claimed that capitalism is actually coercion, even though free markets are based on voluntary exchange. Or the statist columnist who argued people aren’t free unless they’re entitled to other people’s money, even though that turns some people into unfree serfs.Now I have another example of upside-down thinking. It deals with the “inversion” issue, which involves American-chartered companies choosing to redomicile overseas.

Pfizer…wants to turn its back on America by claiming to be an Irish company through an offshore merger, giving it access to Ireland’s low tax rates. The change would only be on paper. The company would still be run from the United States, enjoying all the benefits of being based in America—such as our taxpayer-supported roads, public colleges, and patent protections—without paying its part to support them.

There’s a remarkable level of inaccuracy in that short excerpt. Pfizer wouldn’t be claiming to be an Irish company. It would be an Irish company. And it would still pay tax to the IRS on all U.S.-source income. All that changes with an inversion is that the company no longer would have to pay tax to the IRS on non-U.S. income. Which is money the American government shouldn’t be taxing in the first place!

Here’s more from the article.

Pfizer could walk out on its existing U.S. tax bill of up to $35 billion if its Irish tax maneuver goes forward. That’s what it already owes the American people on about $150 billion in profits it has stashed offshore, much of it in tax havens.

Wrong again. The extra layer of tax on foreign-source income only applies if the money comes back to the United States. Pfizer won’t “walk out” on a tax liability. Everything the company is doing is fully compliant with tax laws and IRS rules.

Here’s another excerpt, which I think is wrong, but doesn’t involve misstatements.

When corporations dodge their taxes, the rest of us have to make up for what’s missing. We pay for it in higher taxes, underfunded public services, or more debt.

The “rest of us” aren’t losers when there’s an inversion. All the evidence shows that we benefit when tax competition puts pressure on governments.

By the way, the author wants Obama to arbitrarily and unilaterally rewrite the rules .

President Obama can stop Pfizer’s biggest cash grab: that estimated $35 billion in unpaid taxes it wants to pocket by changing its mailing address. There are already Treasury Department rules in place to prevent this kind of overseas tax dodge. As now written, however, they wouldn’t apply to Pfizer’s cleverly-crafted deal. The Obama Administration needs to correct those regulations so they cover all American companies trying to exploit the loophole Pfizer is using. It already has the authority to do it.

Needless to say, Pfizer can’t “grab” its own money. The only grabbing in this scenario would be by the IRS. Since I’m not an international tax lawyer, I have no idea if the Obama Administration could get away with an after-the-fact raid on Pfizer, but I will note that the above passage at least acknowledges that Pfizer is obeying the law.

Now let’s look at some analysis from someone who actually understands the issue. Mihir Desai is a Harvard professor and he recently explained the reforms that actually would stop inversions in a column for the Wall Street Journal.

Removing the incentive for American companies to move their headquarters abroad is a widely recognized goal. To do so, the U.S. will need to join the rest of the G-7 countries and tax business income only once, in the country where it was earned. …Currently, the U.S. taxes the world-wide income of its corporations at one of the highest rates in the world, but defers that tax until the profits are repatriated. The result is the worst of all worlds—a high federal statutory rate (35%) that encourages aggressive transfer pricing, a significant restriction on capital allocation that keeps cash offshore, very little revenue for the Treasury, and the loss of U.S. headquarters to countries with territorial tax systems.

That’s a lesson other nations seem to be learning. There’s only a small handful of countries with worldwide tax systems and that group is getting smaller every year.

Japan in 2009 and the United Kingdom in 2010 shifted to a territorial tax regime and lowered their statutory corporate rates. The U.K. did so to stop companies from moving their headquarters abroad; Japan was primarily interested in encouraging its multinationals to reinvest foreign earnings at home.

Professor Desai closes with a broader point about how it’s good for the American economy with multinational firms earn market share abroad.

…it is mistaken to demonize the foreign operations of American multinationals as working contrary to the interests of American workers. Instead the evidence, including research by C. Fritz Foley, James R. Hines and myself, suggests that U.S. companies succeeding globally expand at home—contradicting the zero-sum intuition. Demonizing multinational firms plays to populist impulses today. But ensuring that the U.S. is a great home for global companies and a great place for them to invest is actually the best prescription for rising median wages.

…why would a company consider such a restructuring? The answer: the uncompetitive U.S. corporate income tax code. Attempts to punish companies that are pursuing corporate inversions misdiagnose the problem and, in so doing, make a bad situation worse. The problem that needs to be solved is the uncompetitive and overly burdensome U.S. corporate income tax code. The U.S. corporate income tax code puts U.S. companies at an unsustainable competitive disadvantage compared to their global competitors. The corporate income tax code in the U.S. imposes the highest marginal tax rate among the industrialized countries (a combined federal and average state tax rate of 39.1 percent), is overly-complex, difficult to understand, full of special interest carve-outs, taxes the same income multiple times, and taxes U.S. companies based on their global income.

Mr. Winegarden also makes the key point that a company that inverts still pays tax to the IRS on income earned in America.

…a corporate inversion does not reduce the income taxes paid by U.S. companies on income earned in the U.S. Following a corporate inversion, the income taxes owed by the former U.S. company on its income earned in the U.S. are precisely the same. What is different, however, is that the income that a company earns outside of the U.S. is no longer taxable.

Let’s now return to the specific case of Pfizer.
Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center explains in National Review why the entire inversion issue is a classic case of blame-the-victim by Washington.

Almost 50 companies have chosen to “invert” over the last ten years. More than in the previous 20 years. …there are very good reasons for companies to do this. …for American businesses operating overseas, costs have become increasingly prohibitive. …Europe now sports a corporate-tax rate below 24 percent, while the U.S. remains stubbornly high at 35 percent, or almost 40 percent when factoring in state taxes. …it’s the combination with America’s worldwide taxation system that leaves U.S.-based corporations so severely handicapped. Unlike almost every other nation, the U.S. taxes American companies no matter where their income is earned. …So if a U.S.-based firm does business in Ireland they don’t simply pay the low 12.5 percent rate that everyone else pays, but also the difference between that and the U.S. rate.

Veronique explains why Pfizer made the right choice when it recently merged with an Irish company.

That’s a sensible reason to do what Pfizer has done recently with its attempt to purchase the Irish-based Allergan and relocate its headquarters there. The move would allow them to compete on an even playing field with every other company not based in the U.S. Despite the impression given by critics, they’ll still pay the U.S. rate when doing business here.

And she takes aim at the politicians who refuse to take responsibility for bad policy and instead seek to blame the victims.

…politicians and their ideological sycophants in the media wish to cast the issue as a moral failure on the part of businesses instead of as the predictable response to a poorly constructed corporate-tax code. …Clinton wants to stop the companies from moving with an “exit tax.” Clinton isn’t the first to propose such a silly plan. Lawmakers and Treasury officials have made numerous attempts to stop businesses from leaving for greener pastures and each time they have failed. Instead, they should reform the tax code so that businesses don’t want to leave.

Let’s close with an observation about the Pfizer controversy.
Perhaps the company did make a “mistake” by failing to adequately grease the palms of politicians.
Consider the case of Johnson Controls, for instance, which is another company that also is in the process of redomiciling in a country with better tax law.
Brent Scher of the Washington Free Beacon reports that the company has been a big donor to the Clinton Foundation, which presumably means it won’t be targeted if she makes it to the White House.

Hillary Clinton has spent the past few months going after Johnson Controls for moving its headquarters overseas, but during a campaign event on Monday, her husband Bill Clinton said that it is one of his “favorite companies.” …He described Johnson Controls as “one of my favorite companies” and praised the work it had done in the clean energy sector during an event in North Carolina on Monday. …Johnson Controls has contributed more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation and also partnered with it on numerous projects over the past eight years and as recently as 2015. Some of the Clinton Foundation projects included multi-million commitments from Johnson Controls. Bill Clinton pointed out in his speech that his foundation has done business with Johnson Controls—something that Hillary Clinton is yet to mention.

For what it’s worth, the folks at Johnson Controls may have made a wise “investment” by funneling money into the Clinton machine, but they shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that this necessarily protects them. If Hillary Clinton ever decides that it is in her interest to throw the company to the wolves, I strongly suspect she won’t hesitate.
Though it’s worth pointing out that Burger King didn’t get attacked very much by the White House when it inverted to Canada, perhaps because Warren Buffett, a major Obama ally, was involved with the deal.

But wouldn’t it be nice if we had a reasonable tax code so that companies didn’t have to worry about currying favor with the political class?

About Me

Green is a mixture of blue and yellow. That is the only factual definition of green that will stand the test of time. After that; any other definition is a corruption of a perfectly nice color. I have been an exterminator for 35 years. I have served as a trustee on industry association boards representing pesticide and fertilizer applicators actively for almost 25 years. I believe that what we do isn't just a job; it's a mission! We are that thin gray line that mans the wall telling the world; "no one will harm you on my watch". I also believe that to be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against. Our greatest worry is those within who support and facilitate their misanthropic goals.